STOCKTON - After all the other students had left the Stagg High theater Wednesday afternoon, senior Charnay Brown-Thomas approached her school's guest speaker with a small request.

"May I shake your hand?" asked Brown-Thomas, 19.

Sephira Shuttlesworth was more than happy to grant the wish. The 55-year-old Shuttlesworth addressed two gatherings of Stagg students Wednesday, speaking of her late husband, civil rights leader Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth.

During Sephira Shuttlesworth's 30-minute speech, she spoke of her childhood in the segregated south and urged the members of her young audience to glimpse the larger world and carry on the fight for civil rights.

"We tore the hinges off the doors so that you would have opportunities," said Shuttlesworth, who is scheduled to speak today to a group of students at University of the Pacific. "You need to do something with it. ... It's coming time now to hand off the baton to you."

With Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth was a member of the civil-rights movement's "Big Three," cofounders in 1957 of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Shuttlesworth, who died in 2011 at 89, was subjected to beatings and bombings while making his stand in Birmingham, Ala., in the 1950s and 60s.

Today, Shuttlesworth's widow lives in Birmingham. She spoke to Stagg's students wearing a T-shirt that included an image of her husband as a young man and a 1961 description of him by CBS News as "the most feared man by southern racists." Sephira Shuttlesworth's tie to Stockton is through her longtime friends, Rita and Stewart Jacoby, the latter a Stagg High history teacher.

During her speech, she shared memories of her own role in the civil-rights struggle as a child in Jackson, Tenn. She was one of the few black children attending her school in 1968, a 9-year-old girl taking part in the daunting fight to desegregate the South.

"When trouble came, we didn't run," Shuttlesworth told Stagg's students. "We stayed there, we took it, we learned, we excelled and we won."

Particularly painful was her recollection of King's assassination on April 4, 1968. The next day, an announcement was made over her school's public-address system. Shuttlesworth recalls the cheers of her white classmates.

"They killed Dr. King," she tells students now, "but they gave birth to a dream, and that dream still lives today. A dream is a hard thing to kill."

During an interview Wednesday, Shuttlesworth said her goal during her visit to Stagg was to let students know "they have the power to change their circumstances and the world."

"This is the best place to plant seeds of hope, isn't it?" she added.

After shaking Shuttleworth's hand, Brown-Thomas said she'd been moved by the speaker's words.

"What she had to say was really inspiring," Brown-Thomas said. "A lot of African-American people don't know their own history. We need to expand on what we know."